A Journey Integrating AI Agents in WordPress Using MCP  ## Metadata - Author: [[Open Channels FM]] - Full Title: A Journey Integrating AI Agents in WordPress Using MCP - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/abff48c6-d505-4969-b4b1-e1d0b53bc5b3 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Tihomir's WordPress Journey** - Tihomir transitioned from mobile development to WordPress after seeing younger developers embrace WordPress sites. He built his first WordPress plugin in 2011 and developed it further into an MCP integration. Transcript: Tihomir Dmitrović All right so i would like to say that I'm a classic developer. I always wanted to be a programmer. And as soon as I graduated, I started working. And I had the luck to work in mobile industry during 2000s. And if you remember, it was also a crazy time. It was mobile phones, logos, pictures memory polyphone melodies games and we were in that business and what we were developing those kind of quizzes and delivery services those are Web services and administration guis and there was that need for shipping a lot of small customizations and then we were our solutions we were changing and developing them as no code Solutions and I spent something like 10 years in that environment and kind of specialized building no code solutions But this is all non-WordPress related, but that classic backend Developer, something like that. But I was hanging out with some younger guys and they were showing me, oh, look, I'm building websites about movies, about games, and it's WordPress, great thing. And I always liked and the web and the PHP. And I saw that as a great opportunity and started building, putting some interest in the WordPress. And I even developed my first plugin and something in 2011. Dave Lockie It was first iPhone optimized mobile gallery amazing so you came to my attention because you've been building a an mcp for wordpress so maybe let's start out by defining terms what is Tihomir Dmitrović An mcp mcp is just protocol api you know we are all working with the apis so it has some actions that you can call with some arguments and get back so some kind of set of rules how two platforms Dave Lockie Two applications are communicating over the net right so basically it's just that and how does it why does it have a different name from api what's an mcpe compared to an api it's optimized Tihomir Dmitrović For use with ai agents okay so what basically it means when you are working with those AI agents, AI APIs actually, because every that agent that we are communicating is actually making API requests to, I don't know, OpenAI or Google, whoever is provider of the AI model. And inside of that we can put some instructions how to behave but we can also put descriptions of the actions it can take okay so mcp stands for model context protocol correct yes and it Dave Lockie Was created by anthropic you make claude but it's also now adopted by lots of other models, including their OpenAI. Tihomir Dmitrović Yeah, right now it seems like the most prominent standard, but it's good to know that there is maybe almost 20 different variations of the standard by different players. And we are not talking just about MCP. Second, most famous is Google's initiative, Agent2Agent. It's a slight different thing, but again, he's trying to define how some smart agent that people are using, like in the cloud desktop application will communicate with some end external Dave Lockie System like your wordpress website maybe even your comic shop okay so we can think of it simply as an api that's designed for ai agents to be able to use? Yes. Okay, great. All right. So what initiated your thought process of, huh, I need an MCP for WordPress. How did that start? Tihomir Dmitrović Okay. Well, curiosity. Okay. So let me just go step back with what am I doing in the WordPress, right? So in one moment, there was that Alexa thing and smart speakers. And they are also advertised that it was some AI stuff. But it's not even nearly comparable what we have right now with these large language models. And we created that no code tool called conworks for managing that kind of stuff and it failed that market failed completely me as a entrepreneur and marketing guy it's all also didn't Go too good and i was about to end up everything. But that was the moment that ShedGPT came out. And I said, okay, no, we have a great no-code tool. Let's continue with the GPT. And since then, I'm doing that actually in my something like free time. And in all that was happening on this, that AI market, MCP came out. It's actually something that was missing. And no wonder that people are using that so much. And I said, why wouldn't I have that in the converse? ([Time 0:01:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/28233a49-11eb-41ea-8a10-d2d8e03b2436)) - **MCP's AI Optimization** - MCP is a protocol optimized for AI agents to communicate with APIs, beyond classic REST APIs. It enables asynchronous operations with two separate channels for commands and responses. Transcript: Tihomir Dmitrović Just protocol api you know we are all working with the apis so it has some actions that you can call with some arguments and get back so some kind of set of rules how two platforms two applications Dave Lockie Are communicating over the net right so basically it's just that and how does it why does it have a different name from api what's an mcpe compared to an api it's optimized for use with Tihomir Dmitrović Ai agents okay so what basically it means when you are working with those AI agents, AI APIs actually, because every that agent that we are communicating is actually making API requests To, I don't know, OpenAI or Google, whoever is provider of the AI model. And inside of that we can put some instructions how to behave but we can also put descriptions of the actions it can take okay so mcp stands for model context protocol correct yes and it Dave Lockie Was created by anthropic you make claude but it's also now adopted by lots of other models, including their OpenAI. Tihomir Dmitrović Yeah, right now it seems like the most prominent standard, but it's good to know that there is maybe almost 20 different variations of the standard by different players. And we are not talking just about MCP. Second, most famous is Google's initiative, Agent2Agent. It's a slight different thing, but again, he's trying to define how some smart agent that people are using, like in the cloud desktop application will communicate with some end external Dave Lockie System like your wordpress website maybe even your comic shop okay so we can think of it simply as an api that's designed for ai agents to be able to use? ([Time 0:03:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f4f4439-4c6d-4bf6-8aaf-abb61258c508)) - **Pivot from Alexa to GPT and MCP** - Tihomir's earlier no-code tool for Alexa integration failed commercially, but after ChatGPT's release, he restarted development integrating GPT with MCP. This led him to implement MCP in ConvoWorks to support AI workflows. Transcript: Tihomir Dmitrović Okay. Well, curiosity. Okay. So let me just go step back with what am I doing in the WordPress, right? So in one moment, there was that Alexa thing and smart speakers. And they are also advertised that it was some AI stuff. But it's not even nearly comparable what we have right now with these large language models. And we created that no code tool called conworks for managing that kind of stuff and it failed that market failed completely me as a entrepreneur and marketing guy it's all also didn't Go too good and i was about to end up everything. But that was the moment that ShedGPT came out. And I said, okay, no, we have a great no-code tool. Let's continue with the GPT. And since then, I'm doing that actually in my something like free time. And in all that was happening on this, that AI market, MCP came out. It's actually something that was missing. And no wonder that people are using that so much. And I said, why wouldn't I have that in the converse? Once I started, okay, so it's not just like simple REST API. It is kind of a bit more difficult to implement protocol when you are programming your own server. And it's the main issue, for example, comparing to the classic APIs, using two channels. You have one channel to issue comments and on another channel, you are receiving responses. That's where actually you can trigger asynchronous operations. That's why that kind of stuff is interesting. So anyway, I implemented that. It fits quite well with what we already had. And it's a nice thing. ([Time 0:06:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1dabc6b0-e2ec-44dc-8bee-c456aa309003)) - **ConvoWorks Runs MCP Locally** - ConvoWorks is a WordPress plugin that hosts MCP server functionality locally. It allows users to build workflows connecting WordPress hooks, APIs, and MCP endpoints without needing an external SaaS. Transcript: Dave Lockie What's the actual technical integration? You know, is this a, is it a plugin? Is it like a API? Like, tell us how it works technically. So actually, you have to first install ConvoWorks. So ConvoWorks. So C-O the no-code powerhouse. Okay. Tihomir Dmitrović Yeah. So actually, you can build different workflows. And when you are building that workflow, then we call that service. You can, it's just a workflow, JSON definition, which components are executing. And then there is another thing you can enable access to that workflow from different platforms. Like one platform can be chat, but one platform can be MCP server, which receives a request and starts that workflow. So what I've done here, I've done just specialized component for MCP, and you put that in the workflow. And here you have some basic MCP stuff is already implemented. And in that ConvoWorks service, there is a place you can add your own components and implement what they will do. Add your functionalities, tools that you want to expose. Dave Lockie Okay, so you've got a ConvoWorks platform like a SaaS. You then have like a ConvoWorks worker plugin that you install in your WordPress site which comes with some I guess like generic WordPress MCP functionality and then you can also within Tihomir Dmitrović The plugin extend that to customize it for your needs is that accurate? Almost so there is no SaaS, right? Everything is that plugin. So it's all localized, private. Imagine that you can have, for example, multiple websites with one Elementor. You go into Elementor plugin and create new and then create new. And everything is working on the one website. Here you have those workflows and you just create new in that plugin and you enable, okay, this one is connected to MCP. This one is connected to some hooks and that kind of stuff. But anyway, everything is inside that plugin. Dave Lockie So convo works is an application ([Time 0:09:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c6cbcc7c-d385-41c8-abd1-b21950d984b0)) - **AI Automated Support Tickets** - Tihomir built an automated support ticket system within WordPress using ConvoWorks and Fluent Support. It semi-automatically generates replies using vector search and AI, notifying an admin for approval before responding. Transcript: Dave Lockie What can they do now with ConvoWorks that they could not do before? Tihomir Dmitrović I like to troubleshoot issues with that. So, for example, I have the chat. Again, there is a template. It's a chat that has access to all WordPress, all PHP functions in that system. So I can talk to it and try to fetch some data from the database. It will build query It will execute WP database and it will execute a query and it will tell me what are the results or I can ask it to fetch some posts. For troubleshooting, it's a great thing what I'm doing right now for myself as an administrator and developer. But also, I created a couple of implementations for my test customers. And one of the examples was automated support ticket system. So customer had a website and he has a community and each day he has a couple of support tickets and most of them are already answered everything is on the website you know how it is 90 of Those are easily to handle so we catch up the hook when the new ticket is created. We compare to database what we have already answered, and we generate a new answer, and it was built with the fluent support system. Okay. Dave Lockie And so this is not a ticketing system that's based on WordPress. Like the end user's website doesn't need to be on WordPress. They just need to build an interface to ConvoWorks and then ConvoWorks is using WordPress to store all of the conversations and feed back into the LLM to generate an answer no this is Tihomir Dmitrović A full WordPress solution so it's a website with a fluent support fluent CR, and that kind of stuff. And everything works in the WordPress. Everything stays in the WordPress. Okay. We just use, for example, OpenAI as a model for agent, and we are using Pinecon for storing and semantic search. Dave Lockie Okay, fine. So when a new ticket comes into the WordPress database, then your workflow takes that support ticket and does a vector search against all of the previous tickets and answers, grabs The top five responses, chucks all of that at OpenAI with a templated prompt that says, the question here's what we think are the best answers please generate a nice message to go back To the customer it generates the response answers the support ticket and that's the kind of end-to process yes there are a couple of more steps here so uh we made it semi-automatic we Tihomir Dmitrović Generate a response we schedule that save that and we notify administrator right and uh right now administrator actually has to click on the link interestingly, that link leads to Custom endpoint, which is also built with the code, which just changes the status of that prepared response to approved. And the scheduler job will catch it in the next run and will actually create a response to the ticket using the fluent API. So everything in ([Time 0:16:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/599811ad-d21a-45a8-abde-442aa954c4cc)) - **AI-Aided Development Workflow** - Tihomir uses ChatGPT and code assistants extensively for development. He even created an admin bot that reads plugin files and generates new code snippets, simplifying workflow creation. Transcript: Dave Lockie Like? Do you use Cursor or WindSurf? Or are you just on VS Code? Or are you like super hardcore backend developer, Notepad? And I don't know, Vim or something. Where are you on the scale? Tihomir Dmitrović Most of the time, I'm using Chagipity. So since the beginning, I bought a premium. And I'm using that. Quite skilled in that. How to, you know, not to spend too much time on the copy-pacing. But I'm trying also in Visuals, VAS code, also to use Klein, which is our co-pilot, but I'm not skilled that much yet on that part. Dave Lockie Well, OpenAI bought Windsurf, so if you haven't tried that, maybe just chucking the whole plugin into windsurf would be interesting to see how it manages it as well obviously like you Know version control take it back up because it's also likely to mess it mess stuff up but um yeah i've been building various things for wordpress in that way it's been pretty interesting So i just create like a virtual like a symlink from my wordpress like local thing over here to the plugin folder that's in my cursor project and then like it has access to the whole wordpress Tihomir Dmitrović Plugin without having to worry about the whole wordpress application this works pretty well i'm also using uh simlings to put my plugin into the wordpress uh and there is also one interesting Thing i was doing actually with conworks there is that admin bot that we have template which can do everything and i was talking with it and it was actually reading files from my plugin And installation and creating. Okay, here is your example. I was wrapping up WordPress REST APIs, and I created this example with the post endpoint. And then I said, okay, read those files and create me the same for the users, settings, and whatever we had there. And it was just done that inside of the installation. Something like that WindSurf is doing. Dave Lockie Nice. You built your own WindSurf as well as Convox. ([Time 0:28:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6ca116c1-2f26-47f7-8c65-110fad993ee2)) - **Future of WordPress and AI** - WordPress will remain relevant due to its massive ecosystem, but AI's central role will likely be cloud-based. WordPress should evolve by incorporating MCP clients to orchestrate AI tasks internally rather than outsourcing them. Transcript: Tihomir Dmitrović Here how do you see those two technologies intersecting and you know uh when i'm looking at those vibe quarters what they are doing with their cell replets and all that kind of stuff i Would say it's actually pretty much their situation so people vibe coding yeah applications built on wordpress that would be great if we end up with that and do you think it's likely I don't know Good answer. Okay, WordPress have that huge amount of the existing businesses and websites. So this is a good thing and it will not just fade away just like that. Because people are thinking about business, not technology. It was the older time. Yeah. So we have some time here. MCPs and actually that feature API, which brings WordPress more closer to AIs, is a very good step to keep us in the track in the game. But it would be not, you see, when you are using, for example, these MCPs, you are using Cloudy, you are using Windsurf, you are using other things. So WordPress is just maybe if you are going to use it, it's just a side player. So central role is in the Cloud. So what we are maybe missing here in the WordPress in the future, what I would like to see is something like MCP client, which uses other things. Right. So why wouldn't I have in my WordPress background process that searches the internet through one MCP, generates images or something through another MCP, whatever. Why WordPress wouldn't do that? I don't like that things are executed somewhere else. Yeah, okay. That was, for example, why we actually started with the Converx and Alexa. Everything was outside. Why would that be outside? I want that everything in the WordPress. Here is the data. Is everything we have i want that to run inside the wordpress so this is the idea behind converse it's an awkward tool but not in the cloud in your wordpress that's a great vision and last Dave Lockie Question then what advice would you give to ([Time 0:34:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2edbaeaa-805b-4ac1-be4f-5b6e92bc83c2)) - **Just Use MCP to Train Yourself** - Start by simply using MCPs frequently to train yourself. Mastering the tool comes first before more advanced applications develop. Transcript: Dave Lockie What's been interesting? Tihomir Dmitrović Okay, it's still early. MCPs are cool, but try just to use it. Just to use it. That's enough for now. Use it for everything, for anything, just to train yourself, actually. It's a tool. I remember earlier when new guys come to the company. So first thing we were learning, teaching them to use the Google, right? You have to spend some time in learning the tool. Just that for now. Everything else will come up by itself. ([Time 0:37:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84509196-cb63-48ea-bad1-43afd0c374c6))